Rackspace Acquires Anso Labs; Furthers Commitment to OpenStack

We recently celebrated the six-month anniversary of the launch of OpenStack, coinciding with the project’s second release in that short time. This rapid progress was only possible due to a common shared vision of the entire OpenStack community to build a truly open operating system for the cloud. More than 50 organizations and 1,000 individuals are involved in defining that mission and moving it forward. And while we are pleased with the progress to date, we at Rackspace want to increase our commitment to the success of that mission.

To that end, you may have seen stories reporting that Rackspace has acquired Anso Labs. Anso Labs is a participant in the OpenStack project and has already contributed substantially to its success. They are best known for work they have done with NASA to help build their Nebula cloud platform, the code behind which NASA contributed to the open source community as the basis for OpenStack Compute last summer. Anso Labs — like Rackspace — believes the world needs a truly open cloud platform and are committed to building it.

This acquisition marks a significant step forward in our investment in the success of OpenStack. We believe OpenStack is the right cloud operating system for the industry, and we are committed to the continued evolution of this open platform and to powering our own cloud with OpenStack for many years to come.

We also recognize this takes two of the largest contributors to the projects today and puts them under one umbrella. For some people that will create concerns that Rackspace exerts too much control over the project. Our intent is quite the opposite. We launched this project because we felt that as part of a broader community, we could build something better. Our long-term vision is one in which this open community continues to thrive, with more and more contributions and direction coming from the diverse group of organizations and people joining the project every day. With companies like Cisco, Citrix, Canonical, Dell and over 50 others now participating, our vision of a movement that is open to all and backed by an industry (not any one player) is becoming more real every day.

To ensure that the direction of the project is indeed determined by the many active members of this community, we are exploring changes in the community management processes including the governance structure. If you have any feedback on the types of changes you’d like to see, we would love to hear it. This is only the beginning for this community we are building together, and we look forward to many years of collaboration in the open.

Thank you for your continued support of OpenStack! We believe it holds great promise for customers and are humbled to be part of a community comprised of such talented people and forward-thinking organizations.